Believe it or not, behind the robo-calls and attacks and pre-convention shopping sprees to Saks for the Palinatrix, a serious debate is actually taking place in this presidential campaign. As serious as they come, in fact.

We are now talking, more openly than we have in years in the United States, about taxation and the concept of the good society. About the extent to which we're each on our own pursuing self-interest versus the extent to which we constitute a community of shared interests. The fact that we're talking about it is remarkable enough. More remarkable still is that, for the first time in 30 years, the Democrat appears to be poised to win the argument.

There was a time in this country when people mostly accepted taxes. They accepted that taxes were the price we pay for having a good society. Through the middle of the 20th century, marginal tax rates were very high – upwards of 70% on the highest earners.

At the same time of course the American steel and auto and other heavy industries were veritable colossi, facing little global competition. The middle class grew, wages grew, unions prospered, people bought televisions and installed central air conditioning. People complained about taxes, as they have since Rome, but there was no such thing as broad anti-tax sentiment.

Then came the 1970s. The 1973 Opec crisis showed an America vulnerable to foreign market manipulation. Industry began its decline. Inflation hit. Throw in crime and welfare and all the rest – Watergate, Vietnam, the loss of confidence in political leadership and public institutions.

A situation that had been stable for most Americans for two generations was now unstable, and once-reliable economic expansion was no longer the case – 1973 was the first year that inflation-adjusted wages did not increase.

In this context, the tax revolt was born. The great testing ground was California, where a major property-tax revolt resulted in the passage in 1978 of a ballot initiative (Proposition 13) that muddles California property-tax rates to this day.

Two years later came Ronald Reagan. Tax cuts were quickly passed. The top marginal rate today (35%) is slightly less than half what it was in 1979. Ever since, "I'll cut your taxes and the Democrats will raise them" has worked pretty well for Republicans.

Now, it is true today that Barack Obama is promising a tax cut to 95% of earners. We haven't yet reached the point where a Democrat can tell a $40,000 a year…oh, plumber, to pick an occupation out of the air, that his taxes will go up. (We may never get to that point, and it could well be argued that that's not such a bad thing.) But we do at least have the Democrat saying, as he famously said to Joe the Plumber, that wealth should be spread around.

McCain's rhetoric on the trail now, in these closing days, is built around attacking Obama for saying this. The Republican nominee commences today on a "Joe the Plumber tour" (I'm not kidding) in which the main point is to argue that Obama, his actual tax proposal notwithstanding, will raise middle-class taxes and to paint Obama as one believes in confiscatory taxation as a matter of principle (there's an ugly and quasi-racist section of the speech about how Obama wants to give this tax money to welfare recipients, but that's not the main thrust; just, if you will, a disgrace note).

There's a good reason this is McCain's main closing argument – it's worked quite well in most of our recent elections. But this time, maybe not. Reading around this morning, I was struck by an op-ed in the Boston Herald, by Edward Moskovitch, who heads an economics and public-policy consulting firm in Massachusetts. Noting that the state's governor, Deval Patrick, had recently announced $800m in budget cuts, and arguing for federal outlays to the states in the form of economic stimulus money that states could invest in services and infrastructure, he put the matter thus:

In a recent talk, former Gov. Mike Dukakis observed that most people used their federal tax rebates last spring mainly to pay down credit card debt. Much of what they did buy was probably made in Asia, he added. So the rebate had little impact on the U.S. economy.

Hard-pressed states, on the other hand, would spend their share of a fiscal relief package right here at home and, as Dukakis points out, we'd have something tangible like better bridges to show for it.

This is pretty close to being a classic individual-versus-community argument. In the pages of Rupert Murdoch's right-wing tabloid.

If Obama wins, it will be for many reasons, superficial and profound ones alike. It would be too much to say that the American public embraced a redistributionist philosophy – Obama is not making that argument head-on, as well he should not.

But in these economic times, it does seem to be fair to say that more Americans are finally connecting the dots between investment and prosperity, and between their own economic fate and the country's at large. So, if Obama does win, it would not be too much to say the opposite – that a majority of voters rejected a Republican argument that has been the core GOP message since Reagan.

Back in early 2007, in the pages of the Washington Monthly, Mark Schmitt suggested in a prescient, must-read piece that perhaps the great tax revolt was over. In 12 days, we'll have an answer.